That time period was strange for me in the early 90's when Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice And Chains & Soundgarden were becoming popular I was still listening to Guns N Roses & Metallica...also listen to alot of pop from that time...but by the mid 90's when Bush became popular I had begun to listen to them and alot of alternative rock. I do remember being into Nu Metal...like KoRn in the mid 90's before it really got big later on.
Well, in the late 80's/early 90's, I was listening to Guns N Roses...but not really Metallica. I'm trying to remember...but I think that at that time, most of what I was listening do was Springsteen (who I have been a fan of for a very long time), Guns N Roses, Bon Jovi (also a long-time fan), Van Halen (ditto) and bands like R.E.M. and Queen. Also a bit of punk, like say, Jane's Addiction. IIRC. But I was sort of getting bored with arena rock as a whole by that time, and as a result, while I did like some GnR songs, I was never a massive fan or anything. I liked them when they came out (what was it, about 87 or so???? 88 maybe?)...but I just sort of saw them as more of the same thing bands like Van Halen, Bon Jovi and Aerosmith had been doing since the late 70's or early 80's when I was a kid. So I was ready for something different.
I guess you could say I was pretty ripe for Grunge.
This is a question, not an argument starter, so no offense intended: What did Nirvana and Pearl Jam bring that was so "new?" Because to me they didn't do anything that indie label bands of the '80s had been doing as well or better. Not to take anything away from Nirvana, because they were a great band, but what did they have that X, the Minutemen, Hüsker Dü, the Replacements, the Pixies, the Meat Puppets, Sonic Youth etc. didn't have? And album for album, I don't think they stand up that well with those bands. When I saw Nirvana open for Dinosaur Jr. in 1991 I thought they were really good (and LOUD), but never had any idea that they would break out like they did because they didn't stand out that much and were certainly no better than the headliner. Six months later they were the biggest thing in the world. To me it always seemed like they were the right band at the right time, when the underground stuff had percolated down to little brother and sister, who wanted that sound but from a band of their own. But that might just be my bias and I'm missing something.
Well, you sort of mixed up a whole bunch of sounds there and called them all one thing (80's indie rock)...and I don't think that they were. And like AJ said...it's not like any of this is compartmentalized. It's more like a river, IMO...and while some bands change the course of the river, it's still the same river. It's a meaningful bend in the river...not a 'whole new thing' that I'm talking about when I refer to something being 'new'. I mean, by your logic, no one has done anything 'new' since the 1950's (or really, by logical extension, the very beginnings of 'music' itself)...because it's ALL been flowing forward from the same original source, you know? But I think that when each musical generation takes the river in a different direction or moves it a step forward, that, to me, is 'new'.
Punk grew out of rock, for example...but it's STILL rock. To me, punk was 'new'...but by your logic, maybe not.
Husker Du, to me, was more of a pure a punk band (although punk existed before them). Meat Puppets were punk into cowpunk - taking the punk genre in a 'new' direction. It was STILL punk...but I consider what the Meat Puppets did 'new'.
I think that similarly, the Grunge bands took chiefly two influences - 1. the 'hard' arena rock they grew up with (can't speak as much about Nirvana in this regard, but I can tell you that the members of Pearl Jam grew up worshiping The Who); and 2. Punk (in Pearl Jam's case, the Ramones were the chief influence, I would say); and fused them together. In some cases, I think some of the grunge bands threw some alt rock influences into the mix as well (Screaming Trees for sure did this)....but the 'new' thing here was the
fusion of that mix of influences, plus the addition of some of the 'characteristic' grunge markings - fuzzying up the sound, for example....and perhaps pressing the envelope on some lyrical issues farther than it had been pressed by most bands outside of hardcore punk. Grunge, to me, did not generate a new shoot on the tree - instead, it
brought back together a few earlier shoots that had gone different directions into one again - only it looked different than before the split, because of what both shoots had been doing in the meantime.
I don't know...I simply do not see bands like Husker Du, the Pixies, and Meat Puppets as all one big 80's thing. I see them as all doing different stuff...with grunge sort of bringing it all back together under one 'rock' roof again...only looking a lot different than it did before punk split from rock and morphed into cowpunk, etc.
That's the best I can do at explaining what I think was 'new' about Grunge. But I think that if you haven't seen it by now, you probably won't, even after my explanation. It might just be a matter of looking at the river from the river bank rather than from 30,000 feet up in a plane. Still the same river...but the guy on the ground is going to see things differently than the guy in the plane.
Another day, then... 
[edit] I did a search on 3 different sites and came up with the same thing.
